Li Yaoyao

Li Yaoyao was born in Chengdu in 1994. She graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2017, going on to study at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, where she received her MFA degree in 2021. She now lives and works in Chengdu and Chongqing.

Li Yaoyao is the youngest artist in this exhibition, with her works covering performance, installation, video, and poetry. Li focuses on the transformation and extension of her physical environment into a spatiality that is simultaneously contained and being contained. She also encounters and draws connections between “uncertain possibilities.” Recently, Li Yaoyao has been exploring the relationship between the perception of self-imagery, particularly in terms of the body, as well as the attractive forces and tendencies of repetitive memories and future emotions. She begins with a written text, going on to conjure a dream with image and sound, building a parallel world of inner micro-movement which is triggered by perception. She took part in the 12th International Art Exhibition in Italy and the 10th UP-ON Up International Live Art Festival in Chengdu. Her works have been featured at the Chongqing Xu Art Space, as well as in other important art exhibitions at home and abroad.

Piece Description:

Text: Zhong Ting

Human beings are not only natural and societal beings, but also a spiritual. A Dream of Rain seems like dream world of a lost “child,” alluding to “The Butterfly Dream” of Zhuangzi. Is it a dream of rain, or a dream of “me”? Or have “I” and rain become one? With a dream-like perspective, this video introduces the audience to a spiritual time and space, following the artist to different rivers, lakes, coasts, and looking for docks at which to harbor. The double metaphor of “garbage,” the body of fish, garbage, and water, constantly sinking while trying to breathe and land, point to an interrelationship between ecological and spiritual pollution. Nature and its body are in harmony with “me” and “my body.” The senses of insecurity, uncontrollability, helplessness and spiritual loss of “me,” also represent the unease of rain and nature. The video is filled with a faint desire of death in a poetic atmosphere. There is a very thin and tough invisible line pulling the artist’s soul, imbued with a desire for life. This vitality is filled with rain. Between love and death lies a sense of suffocation and its opposite. This emotional expression issuing from the body also reminds people of Li Shangyin’s lost but memorable dream, “In moonlit pearls see tears in mermaid eyes/ With sunburned mirth let blue jade vapour rise.” (Lavish Zither, translated by Xu Yuanchong) This video artwork is full of wandering, blurred, and poetic beauty. It forces us to think about the importance of spiritual ecology.

Exhibited Works